Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration to Latin America

Introduction

Introduction The Prime Minister’s Tears On September 14, 2004, three helicopters hovered over the Colonia Guatapara in the state of São Paulo—a Plymouth Colony for Japanese immigrants to Brazil and their descendents.1 One of the helicopters, carrying Koizumi Jun’ichirō, the prime minister of Japan, suddenly descended and landed where about a hundred Guatapara residents were standing. This stopover was unplanned: when the prime minister saw the message, “Welcome Prime Minister Koizumi,” and the Japanese flag drawn in lime on the red soil from his seat in the sky, he requested the surprise visit. On the ground, the people who had been told that the prime minister would toss down flowers from his helicopter around a memorial to the early immigrants, “fell into rapture” at this totally unexpected “masaka” (impossible) event.2 Surrounded and jostled by the exuberant crowd, Mr. Koizumi shook hands and exchanged greetings. Almost a century after the first settlement of Japanese on that soil in 1908, the descendents of those early immigrants and later arrivals literally and figuratively reunited with their home nation—in the person of the prime minister—on the land of their struggle. The next day, Mr. Koizumi met with another contingent of Nikkeijin (people of Japanese ancestry born or living outside Japan) in the city of São Paulo, which has long been a mecca for Japanese immigration to Latin America.3 Some twelve hundred Nikkeijin listened to his speech in the hall of the Brazilian Society of Japanese Culture in the Liberdade district. It was their first chance since 1974 to meet the prime minister of their ethnic home. In his speech, Koizumi described how much he appreciated the warm- 2 Introduction hearted welcome by the Guatapara compatriots the previous day. “Everyone welcomed me with tears. I was deeply moved. I cannot imagine how many hardships they went through in a foreign country with a different language and climate . . .”4 He was suddenly choked with tears. The audience was silent, some also in tears. In that moment, both the Japanese prime minister and the Nikkei-Brazilians embraced a sense of fraternity. According to Mr. Koizumi, Brazil was “the closest country to [his] heart,”5 and apparently his compatriots (dōhō) had not severed their sentimental or cultural ties with their homeland despite distance in time and space. They shared the remembrance of ordeals and sacrifice. In this sense, their tears were innocent and genuine. Nevertheless, the historical relationship between the Japanese state and the emigrants to Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere under the state-guided emigration policy was knotty and turbulent. From the end of the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, some three hundred thousand Japanese immigrants crossed the Pacific, seeking a new life in terra incognita. Among them, the majority of migrants who left Japan after 1923 were so-called kokusaku imin, or immigrants under a strategic national policy. They were recruited, financed, trained, transported, and resettled in the Latin American colonies by their own government. There are shades of interpretation and evaluation of the meaning of Latin American-bound migration in Japanese history. Opinions are at times sharply divided. Some acclaim the migration as a monumental achievement of Japan’s international advance. The Brazilian Nikkei community of about 1.5 million in population, the largest Japanese community outside Japan; and Alberto Fujimori, the first Nikkei president of the Republic of Peru (1990–2000), are, in this view, quintessential examples. Others call the emigration program nothing but kimin (dumping people) for having abandoned the migrants in the hostile and difficult natural or socioeconomic climates of foreign countries over ten thousand miles away. Some former emigrants have filed suit against the Japanese migration authorities, who the plaintiffs believe were responsible for their plight and affliction. Such contradictory images of Latin American-bound migration motivated me to write a book on the relationship between the Japanese state and the emigrants, as well as the historicity of this trans-Pacific migration within the larger framework of Japan’s nation-state building. Introduction 3 Paradoxes The paradoxical image of Japanese migration to Latin America, as noted above, relates to three conundrums. The first is the mode of migration and settlement. In the history of Japanese migration since the 1880s, Hawaii and North America had been the major destinations for the migrants, the majority of whom were dekasegi (migrant workers). At the start...